Lenten Disciplines

In today’s Thursday Theology, Jerry Burce muses on recent trends in Lutheran approaches to Lent, contrasting them with old approaches to the season.

Peace and Joy, Carol Braun, for the editorial team

Colleagues:

I wrote last week that I was going to pass along some thoughts about the habit, now current among the Lutherans I know, of encouraging the classic Lenten disciplines as a thing for earnest, thoughtful Christians to pay attention to and practice.

To get started I typed “fasting prayer almsgiving Lutheran” in my browser’s Google bar. Here’s a puny sample of the results I got, 100,000+ of them. Exhibit 1 was the first entry on the first page. Exhibits 2 and 3 came from slightly deeper in. I plucked all three from up-to-date websites of Lutheran congregations in the U.S. The words in italics are mine, not theirs.

1.

Today we start the season of Lent, a time of emphasis on spiritual practices. The Great Commandment can be an excellent guide to the spiritual practices of Lent: “You shall love the Lord your God with your heart, mind, and soul and your neighbor as yourself.”

We are to love God. Prayer helps define our relationship to God.

We are to love our neighbor. The giving of alms and other support to the poor shows our love for our neighbor.

We are to love ourselves. Fasting is an excellent discipline to help us get more in touch with ourselves.

During this Lenten season, I encourage you to pay attention to your spiritual disciplines.

To which one aches to add: “Do it, and you will live.”

2.

Beneath a tagline that reads “Confessional Doctrine, Traditional Liturgy”

During the forty days of Lent, God’s baptized people cleanse their hearts through the discipline of Lent: repentance, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

3.

After opening remarks about the writer’s training regimen for long distance running competitions—

February 22, 2012 marks the beginning of another season of “disciplined training.” That day is Ash Wednesday and it is the first day of the Lenten journey which will cover 40 days and end on Easter morning, April 8. It’s a time where we are to focus on strengthening our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving muscles.

+ + + I don’t recall hearing about the classic Lenten disciplines when I was a Lutheran lad. My missionary parents didn’t talk about them. Nor did the LCMS-trained teachers at my elementary school. Nor did the Australian Lutheran pastors who shaped the piety of the high school I attended in Adelaide.

To be sure, we prayed. Every day, both at home and at school. We remembered the poor, though never well enough, our instruction in giving being focused chiefly on chipping in some coins when the collection plate passed by. Fasting was a Catholic thing. If a Lutheran boy thought about it all, it was only for the sake of feeling smug that we, the better Christians, were at perfect liberty to chow down on the meat pies and sausage rolls that were standard fare in the high school tuck shop, also on Fridays. This is not to say that we Lutheran boys and girls were deprived of calls to mortify the flesh. Fact is, these came at us constantly, and not only during Lent. “What does such baptizing with water signify? Answer: …that the Old Adam in us should…daily…be drowned and die, and…a new creature daily come forth and arise,” etc. Or in Jesus’ terms, “Let anyone who would come after me deny him/herself, take up his/her cross, and follow me.” This was year-long fare. To this day I’m able to sing “When I survey the wondrous cross” by heart, all four stanzas of it. This can only be because it was a staple of high school chapel services regardless of the season. “My richest gain I count but loss.” “Love so amazing, so divine / demands my soul, my life, my all.” In other words, give it up for Jesus. Every day. In every way. No time off for good behavior, as Old Adam liked to grumble whenever he surfaced for another gulp of air.

So what was Lent for, back then? The kid’s answer was “More church (sigh).” The adults who ran things would have spoken about the imperative of paying honor and heed to the person and the act at the heart of reality as Christians confess it to be. Whereas at other times of the year we attended to all manner of things that fall under the umbrella of “the Christian faith,” in Lent we zeroed in on Christ and him crucified. As I feebly remember, that was the steady, year-after-year content of the special Wednesday Lenten services that were de rigueur in every Lutheran church I knew of. We studied the Passion. We heard of Jesus’ wounds. We got the perspective of the several players in the drama. We heard tell, over and over, of the love of God beyond all understanding, distilled to its most concentrated form in the Son of God bleeding out his life for the salvation of the world.

What I don’t recollect is being told to do something. The other day I asked a Milwaukee-born friend of similar age and background—straight LCMS in his case—if he remembered this. No, he said. And then with a laugh, “I was a kid. Could be I just wasn’t paying attention.” So I called a retired colleague, a graduate of Hamma Seminary, and asked what Lent was like in his early years as a pastor of the former Lutheran Church in America. The account he gave made me wonder why our forebears in the LCA and LCMS disliked each other so. In Lent, at least, they did the same thing. They preached the Passion. They urged repentance. They did their level best to fasten eyes and hearts on Jesus. What accounts for this sameness? I’m guessing a shared and solid commitment to the original Wittenberg principle of Christian discipleship that Bob Kolb laid out for us so deftly three weeks ago. “If you [trust] in the Lord above all else that he [has] made, you [will] do what the logic of faith makes inevitable.” Or as we Crossings types might spin it, “To fix behavior, attend to the heart. To cure the heart, preach Christ.” Again I’m guessing that this or something very like it drove those Lutheran Lents of yesteryear, however well or poorly they played out. In any case, thus that dreaded dose, for kids, of extra church.

Then something changed. Or so it feels.

I’d love to see Bob Kolb or some of his academic admirers bring the same scrutiny to U.S. Lutheran habits and pieties of the past 50 years that Bob has been applying to the 18th-century pieties of German Lutherans. Instead of and prayerbooks, they’d browse church bulletins and newsletters. They’d pore through the catalogues of CPH and Augsburg Fortress, at least for the years (were there any?) when Lutheran layfolk bothered to shop there instead of dashing down to the local Christian bookstore for the newest best-seller by the latest hot-spit Arminian evangelical. These days, of course, those layfolk do their dashing to amazon.com. How one might study that I haven’t a clue. Nor can I guess how one would track the shifting, evolving content on current-century websites of congregations and districts, of synods and churchwide organizations. I’m ever so glad I’m not the historian who would need to figure such things out.

But I do hope somebody does. Among so much else, I’d like to understand a lot better than I do how we managed to arrive at today’s not-so-Lutheran Lent, the one that makes the nose of a confessional thinker start twitching the way a dog’s does when it smells a rat.

Fasting. Prayer. Almsgiving. Essential Christian habits, yes. About that there’s no Lutheran argument. Melanchthon, writing in the Apology, cheerfully agrees with his Roman opponents that all three are commanded by God (Ap XII.139). Who with even a moderate grasp of all that’s in the Bible would think to dispute that, at least where prayer and care for the poor are concerned? Fasting, to be sure, is a more complicated issue. In the synoptics Jesus gets taken to task because his disciples don’t fast (Mk. 2:18ff, with parallels). The Gospel of John makes no mention at all of the practice. There are three references in Acts 13 and 14 to Christians fasting as they pray. After that the word vanishes from the New Testament, not a peep in Paul, nor even in James. If Melanchthon is willing nonetheless to assert its importance, that’s because he thinks of fasting in a broad sense, not merely as a refusal of food but as anything and everything that Christians do by way of so saying no to their consumptive inclinations. The “mortification” and “discipline” of the flesh, he calls it; and when he speaks of it as a “necessary kind of exercise” he points to Jesus’ injunction to “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation” (Lk. 21:34) and to Paul’s readiness to “pummel my body [soma, not sarx] and subdue it” (1 Cor. 9:27). What’s more, lest anyone in Wittenberg should think that giving sausages up for Lent will fill the bill here, he speaks of “true fasting” which “must be constant, because God constantly commands it”; and what God commands is “diligence” against “indulging the flesh and catering to its desires.” (For the above see Ap XII.139, XIV.45-47.)

Again the question for the historians: how did we get from fasting as diligence against indulging the flesh to fasting as self-love, “an excellent discipline to help us get more in touch with ourselves” (Exhibit 1 above)? That’s the tale I’d love to hear. Until it gets told by someone competent to tell, I’m obliged to shelve my own suspicions in the matter. That’s all they are, suspicions, by no means ready for prime time. To spit them out would be an indulgence of my own flesh and a sin against the eighth commandment, the one that in Luther’s account enjoins us to speak well of our neighbors and explain their actions in the kindest way. That would surely include whatever actions, large or small, have contributed in recent decades to the steady corruption of a proper Lutheran Lent.

And a corruption it is, this new Lutheran Lent with its shift of focus from the cross of Christ to the pushing of the disciplines. Doubtless that shift was well intended. Someone saw reasons for it, found them compelling, and got lots of other influential folks to sign on to the project. It would hardly be the first time that good intentions have gone awry. But gone awry they have. I underscore this for the sake of any other well-intentioned Lutheran neighbors who continue today to support the shift. In a word, it doesn’t work. By focusing attention on desired outcomes it disrupts the very process that produces good outcomes. It downgrades Christ. It yields rotten fruit, or at least it threatens to.

One sees the problem in all three of the opening exhibits that I plucked from those congregational websites. I’ve already held my nose at the first. To imagine that I need to critique it further would insult your Christian intelligence. Still, indulge me. One more shot at the fish-filled barrel: Q. “As you all work away at your ‘spiritual practices,’ who gets the love? Jesus?” A. “Jesus? Who’s that?” (OK, I’m done. Here’s the rifle. Pop away.)

Christ is also missing from Exhibits 2 and 3 unless you’re willing in E2 to find him tucked deeply away in the reference to “God’s baptized people.” E2 adds “repentance” to the list of disciplines, preliminary to the other three. That would be a step in the right direction were we given a clue as to what the repenting was about. We’re told that all four in combination are the means through which the baptized “cleanse their hearts.” A proper preface for Lent () employs precisely that language. That hardly excuses it. Did someone miss the point of Ash Wednesday’s psalm that heart-cleansing is a job only God can do (Ps. 51:7, 10)?

For its part, E3 speaks of ” strengthening our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving muscles” but gives no reason for doing that. Why then “focus” on it? Again, Christ gets no mention, but then neither does God unless, in another excess of charity, we’re willing to find him present by implication as the one we pray to. E3 also trots out another popular feature of the new Lent, by which we find ourselves on a “journey” that starts on Ash Wednesday and “ends on Easter morning.” So much for the constancy of God’s commands that Melanchthon underscored. Come Easter afternoon we all get to loaf, and what? Wait till next year to pray again or say another “no” to the raging old Adam? OK, I’m being unfair. But then if the behaviors touted for Lent are meant for everyday use, why lift them up as special to Lent? And why these behaviors in particular? Why not hard work? Devoted parenting? Consistent truth-telling? Why not manifestations of the “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” that people “guided by the Spirit” are free to exhibit in ways beyond counting (Gal. 5:22-23, 25)? Or why superficial fasting and not the deeper crucifying of the flesh that Paul speaks about in the same passage (Gal. 5:24)? Frankly, the latter sounds far more useful to the Christian person herself, and of much greater benefit to the people who have to live with her.

+ + + Time now to get serious.

The real problem with today’s Lent is far graver than the superficial stuff I’ve sketched so far. It’s as if the greatest gift the Spirit gave the Church through the Wittenberg reformers has been shoved in a corner by their own careless children, and there it sits collecting dust. A few, one fears, have tossed it in the trash. So it strikes me, at any rate.

Here I sing to the choir: Luther and company grasped as few others have that life with God is a matter not of behavior but of trust. If you trust well, you’ll behave well. If you trust poorly the behavior that arises from that, however pretty it appears, will be a stink in the nostrils of God Almighty. Chances are, of course, that it will quickly spread unpleasantness in the neighborhood as well.

This, by the way, is the thrust of the Gospel we hear on Ash Wednesday. See the bits in Matthew 6 about the hypocrites who flaunt their almsgiving, praying, and fasting. (Parenthetically: I’ll bet Jesus mentions these activities and not others simply because they’re the three the hypocrites most like to flaunt. The point is not that followers of his should grant them preferential rank among all other possible behaviors.)

Now it happens that Matthew 6 is an all but perfect text to run through the Crossings sieve, that scheme devised by a couple of recent teachers, Bob Bertram and Ed Schroeder, to help keep the Wittenberg gift dusted off and sparkling in the middle of the room where it belongs.

So here’s how the passage looks in a Crossings 6-step outline: 1 (Surface behavioral problem): Folks are stinking up the joint as they flaunt their piety. 2 (Underlying trust problem): They love the oohs and aahs they get. They believe it amounts to something. 3 (Fundamental God problem): They’ve gotten their reward. No oohs and aahs from God for them. Quite the opposite. 4 (Fundamental Christ solution): Jesus sweetens the whole wide world through the hidden piety of dying for the hypocrites and earning God’s Easter ooh and aah for their sake, and ours too. 5 (Underlying trust solution): We start believing that the ooh and aah bestowed by God on Jesus is the only one we’ll ever need. 6 (Surface behavior solution): We don’t flaunt our piety, we simply do it. We quietly honor our Father with conduct that sweetens the neighborhood. “Ooh and aah,” say some of the neighbors as they think for once to thank God.

True fasting, true prayer, true care for the poor—true whatever, of the kind that deposits the glories of ooh and aah at the feet of the only One who deserves them: that’s what Christ is aiming for (“Let your light so shine,” etc., Matt. 5:16). And wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what he gets out of us when we trust him. But first he has to kill that hankering within for oohs and aahs of our own, the suspicion being that we somehow need them. It’s this ever-present hankering that makes it impossible to elicit what God is looking for from folks by telling them what to do. You get it instead, counter-intuitively, by telling them over and over what Christ has done for them.

That’s not, I think, what our new Lent is doing for the saints.

+ + + Our old Lent did it, though.

Old Lent started with a real Ash Wednesday, not one that diddled around with talk of disciplines and Lenten journeys but focused squarely on dealing the death blow to the old creature’s pretensions. Once a year we were forced to listen. “Dust you are. To dust you shall return.” It will happen not by dint of accident or the mere nature of things, but because God says it must. He’s the one who stands against you, implacably, insurmountably. Don’t think you’ll buy him off with your “good” behavior. Ain’t gonna happen.

Yet wonder of wonders, this God-against-you is also the God who sends his Son to find you in the ash heap, to forgive your sins, to brand you with his cross, and to fill your newly created lungs with the breath, life, and power called Holy Spirit. Don’t be afraid. Away you go not just to die—that you’ll do—but also to live. You’ve got Christ’s promise on this.

So that was Ash Wednesday. Then to reinforce its central point folks heard of Christ their whole Lent long. And from that process, repeated again and again, emerged the old Lutheran codgers that lots of us have known and treasured, and still do. They can be prickly, difficult, dense; here and there prideful; not always easy to get along with. But oh my goodness, how generous they can be. How devoted to prayer and daily devotion. How fiercely committed to starving the beast called “self,” or trying to, at least. And in myriad other ways they bless the world God sends them into day after day. Those codgers are the living proof, it seems to me, of the Wittenberg point. Preach Law to kill. Preach Gospel to resurrect. Preach Christ, Christ, Christ, and watch how good things start to flow from trusting hearts.

I think we ought to start a movement to retrieve the Lent that was. Our kids won’t like it too much. Gone will be their chance to brag about giving up chocolates, and in its place will come the agony of still more church. So be it. It’s never too soon to start mortifying the flesh with the genuine mortification that comes from the hand and mouth of God and lands us in the lap of Christ our Lord.

It’s from that lap alone that tomorrow’s saintly codgers will finally spring.

Jerome Burce Lakewood, Ohio March 29, 2012

The Divorce of Sex and Marriage: Sain Sex, a new book by Robert Bertram, is now available for a $10 donation to Crossings. Please include $3 for shipping and handling, and send your request to [email protected].

You can support the ministry of the Crossings Community with a tax-deductable donation via PayPal (click icon below). The “Heart Disease” of Self- Referential Faith

Colleagues,

I was planning to write today’s offering, but time ran out. Look for it next week, when I’m going to raise a question or two about whether pastors and churches are well-advised to tout the classic disciplines of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving as the thing for folks to concentrate on during Lent. I think not, at least not in the way I hear them being touted these days. I also think that Robert Kolb laid out a superb case over the past two Thursdays for being chary of them. But more on that, as I say, next week.

For now we send you something better, a reflection by an ELCA bishop on the sort of thing that does demand our attention in Lent, indeed, the very thing that the ongoing discipline of God’s Law and God’s Gospel seeks to address. The author is Bishop Martin Wells of the Eastern Washington-Idaho Synod. Bishop Wells had been asked to present a paper at January’s Crossings Conference on “The Church Executive as Disciple.” For reasons he explains himself, he wound up inviting four other ELCA bishops to share the assignment with him. Together they put together one of the most compelling hours of the entire event. We’ll pass along some other pieces of that in coming weeks or months. For now, start with Bishop Wells. Those who heard him in person couldn’t help but thank God that he’s a leading pastor of the Church. We suspect you’ll do the same.

Peace and Joy, Jerry Burce, for the editors Address to the 4th Annual Crossings Conference, January 22-25, 2012 Conference Theme: “The Gospel-Given Life: Discipleship Revisited”

“The Heart-Disease of Self-Referential Faith”

I’m very grateful to Dr. Kuhl for this invitation and still more grateful for the committee’s flexibility in shifting from a presentation by one bishop to this panel format. I’m deeply grateful to my partner bishops for stepping into the breach on behalf of the conference.

This change was occasioned by the loss of preparation time last fall as a brother came to live with us—and now it looks like it will be for the whole winter—seeking treatment for a papillary squamous-cell carcinoma, a nasty mouth cancer. We have become my brother’s keeper not out of big hearts, but because he had no place else to go and welcoming him was minimally required under the commandment to honor father and mother. Besides, he’s a wonderful fellow and he and I have learned to live with the ways we drive one another nuts! The same can’t be assumed for a spouse who is asked to open the intimate space of home, particularly when she does her work from home. Thank you to Susan Briehl, my wife.

Please continue to pray and work for those who under the present healthcare system must show up at culture’s door and hope to be let in and be cared for. I see how we pay for it now; how much better if we could give all citizens the chance to seek this care with dignity rather than beg for it. Scott is in the last weeks of radiation and chemo and we are hopeful for a full recovery. + + + I’m so grateful for the excuse to re-readDiscipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and reflect on his words in our present cultural moment. It is a time of serious and deep transition for much of the human family and the aspect of this transition that is most interesting to me is the call to enter the globalized context and in some way move beyond formerly powerful tribal, and religious, and national loyalties into something like a world community.

But shedding old loyalties isn’t easy, even if only for the purpose of making room for others. I’ve experienced this in making room for a brother, but others are experiencing it as a deep threat, made clear by the nativist voices that we hear calling for new protections around that which is supposedly “ours” in this country.

“Ours,” the air we breathe? “Ours,” the clean water we need for the basics of life?

Of all the aspects of the work, the most challenging during my twelve years as bishop has been to face what I’ve come to call such “entitlement thinking.” Such thinking is like the quiet passing of gas in a closed car. It fouls the Spirit and leaves everyone gasping for fresh air and room to breathe. It is the opposite of a deep sense of gratitude, living from gift, the expansive, fresh sense that life means us well, and instead of binding and blinding us, calls us to a sense of “enough,” and for disciples of Jesus, more than enough, pure gift, pure grace, gratitude.

There isn’t time enough to talk about the ways in which such entitlement thinking is choking our church, but I think it is, and my fear is that it will finally demand all the air and smother us, cramping us down into cells of white-hot resentment that look a lot like the congregationalist model of church and put us on an inevitable way to the “Sheilaism” anticipated by sociologist Robert Bellah. It reminds me of the classic joke about the shipwreck survivor, who after years alone on an island is finally rescued. He’s eager to show his rescuers the world he’s built for himself, and passing along, points out a small church and then later a second church building. Asked why he needed a second church the man replied, “Oh I had a fight in the first place and left!” And so it goes.

Against this model of culture and church I believe God intends to call us from gratitude, that expansive sense of release, unbinding, and joy that comes, ultimately, from the gift of trust, the most ancient way we connect with God.

The well I draw from as a disciple and as a church leader is Luther’s description, in the introduction to the First Commandment in the Large Catechism, that—and here I paraphrase—”Our god is that which we ultimately trust, the place to which our hearts incline, cling, and entrust themselves.” As a believer and as a church leader, the first matter of concern—and discipleship—is a matter of the heart.

So, to reflect on discipleship as a church executive, my attention turned to my own “habits of heart” and brother Bonhoeffer’s provocations on Matthew 6, particularly section 167 entitled “The Simplicity of Carefree Life.” It’s here that Bonhoeffer turns to Luther and the first commandment as well.

Luther and Bonhoeffer spend a good deal of time addressing the false god of mammon and, like you, I don’t spend any time worrying about that except as I obsess about the 10% of my salary I gave up two years ago, a gift I’m pretty sure nobody remembers! No, the line that caught my attention was this line from Luther: [P. 386ff, Kolb/Wengert, para 10]: “So, too, those who boast of great learning, wisdom, power, prestige, family, and honor and who trust in them have a god also, but not the one, true God.”

Great learning, wisdom, power (or ambition), honor (or reputation)—and I think we could add today, “conscience”: these are the false gods that draw my eye as a bishop.

I say this to those of you who wonder if you should be called to the office of bishop: It’s true what they say: if you pursue the office out of ambition then you will always wonder if it is God’s call. When you reach for authenticity and the deep authority of the gospel all you’ll remember is that it was always about you. A New Yorker cartoon from 2008 has the patron leaning over the bar whispering to the bartender: “I’m nothing, and yet I’m all I can think about.”

And if you seek wisdom without understanding where it comes from—unusually terrible loss and the way of the cross—and yearn to be known as one who is wise, you will always know that such wisdom is a false god to which you cannot give your heart because you avoid suffering.

To rely on the god of great learning is to end up, as I have, with an office full of books that mock me because I haven’t read them.

Finally, my favorite false god is worry. Here is Bonhoeffer: “We want our worrying to make us worry-free.” Hmm.

Against these challenges I’m here with you today to learn more about the heart and how it trusts, how it follows after the source of trust. I’m here because I think I have seen in these famous lines from Pastor Bonhoeffer what the heart looks like when it clings to Life Itself:

“Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest O God, I am thine!”

The clinging heart, fresh and wet in the embrace of God, lives in ultimate gratitude.

The Divorce of Sex and Marriage: Sain Sex, a new book by Robert Bertram, is now available for a $10 donation to Crossings. Please include $3 for shipping and handling, and send your request to [email protected].

You can support the ministry of the Crossings Community with a tax-deductable donation via PayPal (click icon below).

Discipleship in the Lutheran Tradition, Continued

Colleagues,

Herewith the second installment of Robert Kolb’s exploration of Lutheran thought and practice in matters pertaining to the development of the conscientious Christian. We broke off the tale last week in the latter part of the 16th century. Today Bob ushers us through the 17th century and into the 18th, introducing us along the way to some once famous pastors and teachers whose acquaintance is still well worth making. Then he’ll jump us forward to the middle part of the 20th century and conclude with some thoughts about the challenges facing Lutherans today as they seek from the strength of their tradition to foster disciples whose eyes, hearts, and lives are fixed on Christ where they belong. Not the least of these challenges is the blessed peculiarity of a tradition shaped by the distinction between Law and Gospel. As Bob will put it at the end, “discipleship just looks different in a Lutheran context.” May the aim of grasping why and how encourage your close and careful reading.

Peace and Joy, Jerry Burce, for the editors

The History of Discipleship in the Lutheran Tradition, Part 2

The sixteenth-century disciples of Luther and Melanchthon continued to emphasize that the Christian life is a life of repentance, in the midst of an eschatological battle with Satan and all his minions, they also believed. About mid-century a new literary genre arose and flourished for a generation in the Wittenberg circle – and was peculiar to it – as a means of calling for repentance and for instructing in the new obedience which flows from faith: the “devil book,” the “Teufelsbuch.” The devil played a relatively small role in this genre, but he provided the occasion for focusing on a variety of sins that plagued the baptized of the later sixteenth century. While placing full responsibility for violating God’s law on sinners, these works also highlighted the devil’s wiles and the formidable conflict, not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers, that confronts the baptized. Several of these works addressed problems of faith: Andreas Fabricius’ Holy, Clever, and Learned Devil, opposing the First Commandment of God, opposing Faith, and opposing Christ (1567), Simon Musaeus’s Melancholy Devil, Andreas Lange’s The Worry Devil, or Against the Pagan Worry over the Belly or Bodily Sustenance (1573). [1] Others addressed the actual sins of peasants, artisans, merchants, and nobles, with implications for personal behavior and social deviation. Andreas Musculus’s Trousers Devil excoriated the rich young men, burgher and noble, of Frankfurt an der Oder for their sexually explicit mode of dress and called them to repentance with fierce threats of God’s judgment. The hunting practices of the nobility and the consequent losses suffered by peasants for the sake of the hunt brought Cyriakus Spangenberg’s expression of God’s wrath down upon his superiors. [2] The Ratzeburger home may not have been typical in German, Nordic, Baltic, and Slavic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the large number of devotional books in one form or another indicates an increasing use of such materials for personal and family edification. [3] Sermon books served the purpose—and not only German homiletical collections but also the first work published in Latvian, the of Georg Mancelius (1654), aimed at such a cultivation of trust in the Savior and the practice of a life which reflected his love. [4] Similarly Bernhard Liess’s study of the published sermons of , pastor and hymn-writer, focuses on Christ’s person and work, on the use of the means of grace in personal devotion as well as congregational life, and on personal repentance. [5]

Mancelius wrote for use by preaching pastors and the devotion- leading heads of households, but others wrote specifically for individual or family meditation. Never completely free from the mystical side of the monastic piety which had sustained Luther in part on his way to his evangelical maturation, Lutheran tradition contains some formative thinkers who returned to certain elements of that way of coping with reality in the late sixteenth and seventh centuries. One example of this literature is found in the writings of a Silesian pastor, (1562-1627), who suffered persecution from Counter- Reformation forces in Fraustadt, where Lutherans were thrown out of their church but did get to build a chapel. He promoted a strong personal trust in Jesus with meditations on Bible texts, which found symbols of aspects of the person and work of Christ at every turn but which did little to cultivate new obedience in daily interaction with other human beings. His works treated the passion stories, the Psalms, the pericopes, and Genesis, among others. They reflect a change of mood from the mid-sixteenth century, a more “spiritual” kind of engagement and exchange with God.

Luther’s style of piety requires exertion, for loving the neighbor in the boring grind of the every day is hard work and often not at all exciting. Luther preached the joys which await us in heaven but focused largely on surviving Satan’s assaults and taking care of family and neighbors on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps because other forms of religiosity seem more religious, or perhaps because life in the seventeenth century was evermore grueling and arduous, due particularly to the war, Lutheran piety took a turn toward the other-worldly in a more intense way than we notice in its first two generations. That is seen both in the relatively little attention paid to service in vocation in the daily course of life as well as a more emotional and also other-worldly expression of devotion to Jesus.

Herberger’s reflections on the verses of Genesis sought to exposit “the mysteries of Christ” found there, training readers to think upon the Savior in complete dependence on the Holy Spirit, and with a focus on his suffering and death. He began: “Dearest Reader! Since ‘no one can call Jesus “Lord” except in the Holy Spirit’, and no one can say, write, or think anything beneficial, comforting, or noteworthy about Jesus without God’s Spirit, and since the Holy Spirit’s particular work of grace is to reveal Jesus Christ to our heart and to make Him known: therefore may you first begin by appealing to God the Father in the name of our sweet Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for the light and grace of the Holy Spirit, that you may be able to read this beneficial, comforting work profitably, piously, and to your betterment.” [6] The attitude of total reliance upon Christ led Herberger to pray with his readers, “If I am wrapt in sickness and the anguish of death, if language escapes me and my lips cannot speak, nevertheless, I will groan in my heart, O Lord Jesus, essential Word of the heavenly Father! … Prove now that You are my Spokesman, my Advocate, and my Witness.” [7] The Wittenberg heritage combined with incipient Baroque style to shape the readers’ thinking through the use of intricate literary devices, including metaphors or allegories elaborating on words and phrases of the biblical text, sometimes with more, sometimes less connection to the text itself. Mention of the mustard seed which served as a red dye recalled the blood of Jesus; the use of mustard seeds smoked over coals to ward against snakes reminds readers that Jesus was placed as an offering on the coals of the Father’s wrath to repel Satan’s forces. [8] The “fish and birds” of Genesis 1:21 produce the comparison of Jesus with seven birds; the honeybee provides ten points of comparison with Jesus, the “broody hen” eight. [9] The shedding of Abel’s blood opened a discussion of the vicarious atonement in twelve points of comparison. [10] Not careful exegesis nor the intent of the author but rather the edification of the pious of his own time commanded Herberger’s modus operandi as he moved from the text to Christ’s work in the first century and its significance in the seventeenth. Herberger’s aids for meditation cultivated a sense of repentance in readers but provided little direct encouragement for serving the neighbor and fulfilling one’s callings in home, occupation, society, or, for that matter, the congregation. The charge that perpetrated an individualization and spiritualization of the faith seems justified in Herberger’s work.

Out of this mood of devotional writing grew the concept of an “unio mystica” that united Christ and the believer, propagated, among other sources, by the posthumously edited writings of the Wittenberg-educated Saxon pastor Valentin Weigel (1533-1588). In part out of independent roots, in part to counter the mystical, neo-platonic approach found in the Weigel bequest, forms of piety developed within the “Orthodox” teaching at the university that developed significantly different emphases than Luther had accented while trying to remain within the structure of Christian faith and life which Luther had constructed. [11] The publication of Weigel’s ideas attracted the immediate criticism of Wittenberg professor Nikolaus Hunnius of Wittenberg. His colleague Friedrich Balduin also rejected Weigelianism but argued that a certain union between God and his human creatures takes place through the Word in which God is present and which establishes trust in Christ, who through faith dwells in believers’ hearts. This indwelling is not substantial, however, he insisted. Balduin’s ideas formed the basis of the thinking of one of the most popular of Lutheran writers, who cultivated the life of following Christ through the seventeenth century and into the twentieth, . Arndt’s opposition to the introduction of Calvinism had earned him exile from Anhalt, and as superintendent of the Lutheran church of Braunschweig- Lüneburg he authored some of the most widely read devotional materials in subsequent Lutheran history. Some scholars have argued that Arndt fully abandoned reliance on the means of grace for an inward spirituality that posited a substantial union between believer and God. Eric Lund has recently shown that in his pericopal sermons, published and widely distributed in his own day, Arndt indeed was proclaiming to his hearers a piety rooted in the external word of promise that forgives sins and moves God’s children to lives of devotion and communion with God through the Word as well as service within the callings of daily life to the neighbor. [12] His True Christianity and Little Garden of Paradise did seek to cultivate a practical piety but did so by emphasizing the spiritual communion and union of the follower of Christ with the Lord in mystical expressions.

Other parish pastors in Arndt’s generation and the next found the mystical union a helpful description of the relationship between God and his chosen children but stressed that this union does not result in any substantial “divinization” of the human being. and Statius Buscher (d. 1641), superintendent in Lübeck, both Orthodox in their teaching, insisted that the relationship of bride and bridegroom, a union which preserves and enhances the distinct identities of the two, bound believers to their Lord in working for common goals, and this viewpoint persisted over the century. The Orthodox dogmatician and parish pastor David Hollaz (1648-1713) distinguished the formal or relational union of faith with its personal object, God, from the mystical or sanctifying unity of God and believer: faith justifies and results in indwelling of the (totally distinct) Creator; God is present in the believer’s repentance and justifying faith and that presence produces the life of devotion and service that marks the children of God.

In differing forms of expression this mood of devotional writing is found in the two most popular authors of the genre: the parish pastor and ecclesiastical official Johann Arndt (1555-1621), whose Four/Six Books on True Christianity and Little Garden of Paradise attracted criticism in his own day as spiritualistic and continue to be read in that manner today, and (1582-1637), perhaps the most prominent of the so-called Orthodox Lutheran dogmaticians and who had found in Arndt’s personal counsel the peace of conscience for which Luther had striven. Eric Lund has shown that Arndt’s postils demonstrated a more traditional sense of the pious life, based on the means of grace, than he displayed in his devotional bestsellers [13], and Gerhard’s work certainly did that. Both sought to nurture an intimate trust in Christ and the rhythm of repentance that turns in horror and sorrow from sin to him.

Gerhard’s Sacred Meditations grew out of a bout with serious illness as a young man, and it begins with thoughts on “the true recognition of sin”: “every hour I think about death because death is looming every hour. Every hour I think of Judgment because an account must be rendered for every day at the Last Judgment. … My actions are vain and useless, and many of my words are vain, and many of my thoughts are even vainer.” [14] He responds, “To whom, then, should I flee? To you, O holy Christ, our only Redeemer and Savior. My sins are great, but your satisfaction is greater; my unrighteousness is great, but your righteousness is greater.” [15] Indeed, “the foundation and beginning of a holy life is salutary repentance.” [16] It leads to faith, “a lively and efficacious apprehension of Christ,” uniting us again with our Savior, and producing all virtues. [17] Without Herberger’s allegorical improvisations on biblical images, and with a strong emphasis on the use of the oral, written, and sacramental forms of God’s Word, Gerhard moved on to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love and harmony, who “joins us to Christ through faith, … to God through love, and … unites us with our neighbor through loving affection.” [18] The Meditations does not offer instruction in the conduct of daily life as Gerhard does in his postils, but Meditation Twenty-Eight does present “general rules for a godly life”: “Live dutifully toward God, upright with regard to yourself, and justly toward your neighbor. Act graciously toward your friends, patiently with your enemies, benevolently toward everyone, and also generously, as far as you are able. While you live, die daily to yourself and to your vices, so that when you die, you may live unto God. Show mercy always in the disposition of your mind, kindness in your countenance, humility in your manner. Modesty in your dealings with others, and patience in tribulation.” [19] The focus on the personal attitude and disposition received here no guidance for taking larger social responsibilities seriously, though that realm was not neglected in the preaching of the period.

Jonathan Strom’s study of the reform efforts of the “orthodox” clergy of Rostock in the third quarter of the seventeenth century shows a deep concern among clergy and other civic leaders over the increasing “unfaithfulness” of the laity, despite active participation by most in the religious obligations of worship attendance and outward conformity to the commandments. The sermonic call for repentance sounded constantly from their pulpits. [20] Johann Jakob Fabricius promoted reform efforts in behalf of the integrity of the church over against secular authorities and the lives of the faithful in Schwelm (county of Mark), earning dismissal from office. [21] Princes could also support the cultivation of piety: Ernst the Pious of Saxe-Gotha was a good example of the pious prince who strove to inculcate religion among his subjects, though with at best mixed success. Alongside any question of “success” is the question of how skillfully any of these authors actually employed Luther’s distinction of law and gospel, to what extent they grounded the performance of the Christian in the promise of life fashioned by God in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

These examples from “Orthodox” church leaders remind us that the work of Philip Jakob Spener, who regarded himself as Orthodox and was so regarded by many who claimed the title themselves, did not inaugurate concern for abuses of the gospel in the people’s and the clergy’s way of life. Many “Orthodox” preachers and professors anticipated Spener’s hope to enlighten “eyes of understanding to discern what is the hope of our calling, what are the riches of God’s glorious inheritance for his saints, and how boundless is God’s strength in us who believe that his mighty power is effectual,” to foster “diligence and zeal to be of good cheer and to strengthen others who may grow faith,” as well as “strength and courage” to pursue the Christian life and “blessing and success to observe with joy that the Word that goes for from God’s mouth … shall not return to God empty but shall accomplish that which he purposes and prosper in the thing for which he sent it.” [22] Spener criticized civic leadership, clergy practices, and “defects in the common people,” especially lovelessness, unfaithfulness in hearing and reading God’s Word, drunkenness, resort to law courts to gain advantage over one another, selfishness and exploitation of the poor, and neglect of public worship. Spener believed that he was reviving the “reformational” program of Luther and his colleagues. Indeed, that program continued to be reflected in a variety of ways and combinations in Lutheran churches throughout subsequent generations. As with many of the representatives of the tradition mentioned throughout this essay, Spener understood the various elements of Lutheran piety or discipleship in his own way, but he did strive to deliver God’s Word in oral, written, and sacramental forms to call sinners to repentance and to comfort and console the repentant, and to move them to service to God and the neighbor in their various callings.

The Enlightened cultural domination of the Lutheran churches in Germany and, in milder form, in the Nordic lands, during the eighteenth century considerably weakened Lutheran piety because it altered perceptions of Christ, sin atonement, and the nature and power of God’s Word. It at least partially gave way to the confessional revival of the nineteenth century. Both periods demand more study.

A few disconnected observations about these more recent eras in Lutheran history. In this lecture we have ignored Nordic church life. It reflected many of the same tendencies of the German scene, but especially in the nineteenth century the history of efforts to cultivate faithful living in daily life cannot be written without taking into account the varied efforts of and others in Norway, and his Swedish comrades in the revival of Lutheran piety, figures like Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig or Johann Vilhelm Beck in Denmark, and , whose influence crossed into , where Fredrik Gabriel Hedberg and others led comparable revivals of the faith and life in the Lutheran tradition.

Such movements emphasized foreign and domestic mission, outreach with the gospel to those outside the church and outside the faith. They often cultivated small group Bible study and prayer, as did Wilhelm Löhe, for they followed Luther and Spener in their belief that faithful hearing and reading of Scripture lay at the heart of the cultivation of piety or discipleship.

Another stray observation about this later period: It is easy to misrepresent Lutheran views of the active participation of the Christian in society in the nineteenth century, for it is such a multi-faceted topic. As in many other sectors of European society, some who had earlier advocated a loosening of royal power turned against political Liberalism in the wake of the revolts of 1848. [23] Despite the efforts of those such as Johann Hinrich Wichern (1808-1881) and others, congregations in the larger, industrializing cities failed to minister to the boys and girls from peasant villages who came to better themselves in the new factories of the burgeoning manufacturing areas or in the homes of their managers and owners. The church’s failure to address the social and spiritual needs of these internal emigrants from the villages produced the turn to Marxist labor unions that significantly reduced the Christian role in central and northern European lands.

Yet “quietist” cannot describe all nineteenth-century Lutherans. Lutherans were active in giving cultural and political leadership in some lands in the nineteenth century though not all were equally pious in terms of their personal faith. Louis Kossuth (1802-1894), a Hungarian nobleman and faithful member of his local congregation as well as the larger church, led the revolt of his people against Austrian Habsburg domination in 1848-1849. Kossuth escaped the clutches of the Habsburg government and lived in exile until his death. Another case of Lutheran cultural leadership took place in Hungary’s Slovakian domains. A Lutheran pastor, an opponent of a proposed merger of Lutheran and Calvinist churches in the Hungarian kingdom, the Slovak Jozef Miloslav Hurban (1817-1888), along with his brother pastor Michal Miloslav Hodza (1811-1870), and the author and politician Ludovit Stur (1815-1856), helped create literary Slovak and were active in opposition to Hungarian domination of their people. These Slovaks campaigned against the abuse of alcohol among their people as fiercely as did Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771-1824) in Norway. These church leaders all took some latter-day version of Luther’s understanding of the callings of daily life, which had not been clearly passed on in the great theological works of the periods, seriously. They understood that God had placed them in positions of service to their societies and cultures.

We have not only ignored Nordic and Eastern European Lutherans, but we have also neglected to mention that in the Majority World churches, both immigrant and mission, new forms of piety have developed among Lutherans, a mixture of their heritage brought by the missionaries and their own cultures. They have experienced and experimented with how to take Wittenberg theology seriously at the level of daily life in ways that can be helpful as those in the lands of historic establishment Lutheranism and their cousins in the lands of emigration, as we move into the new situations imposed upon us by the weakening of the Christian tone of traditional Western cultures.

Perhaps, however, the most important question we face as we look at the more recent is why in the last two hundred years, and particularly in the last fifty years, have Lutherans not done a better job at the task of the cultural translation of our understanding of the pious Christian life into the world of today. Many answers may be offered, from the power of media and our failure to capitalize on new developments as quickly as Luther did, to the demise of the culture and more immediate communities around us that supported that piety instead of undermined it. But the most basic reasons that command our attention lie at the foundation of our existence as believers, hearers, disciples, children of God in his congregation. We need to examine again the ways in which we deliver the promise of life from and in Jesus Christ to his people. We need to work on the ways in which both the law and the gospel speak to people who conceive of sin and evil and of life, its sources and its several dimensions in much different ways than their parents and certainly than their forbearers several generations ago.

From Lamin Sanneh we have learned that the church cannot help but be enculturated, by the very design of the Creator, just as the culture in which the proclamation of Christ is heard cannot help but be bent at least a little out of its old shape by the presence of the biblical message. These facts bring both blessings and dangers, especially since sinners seem sinfully naturally to tend to two false perceptions of fundamental realty. The first divides the spiritual and the material, the “sacred” and the “profane,” ignoring the more fundamental demarcation between Creator and creatures, often because there is no grasp of the personal and speaking nature of the Ultimate and Absolute. The second, perhaps because of the absence of the personal God who can be gracious and who likes to be in conversation, involves the focus on human performance of one kind or another as the defining action for humanity rather than recognizing that human actions only proceed from God’s performance as the Creator and Re-Creator, in the cross and resurrection. Apart from the Holy Spirit, we have no ears to hear that re-creative Word that proceeds from cross and empty tomb.

These false teachings are bad because they lead to false trusting and false living, that is, to false following, which bends the core of our persons and personalities out of shape. Bent personalities produce bent actions, twisted works, no matter how good they appear. In the face of that phenomenon Luther called good works detrimental to salvation and Gerhard Forde received his sweatshirt stating “weak on sanctification.” Both were avid advocates of discipleship, in fact, but discipleship just looks different in a Lutheran context. It begins with listening and it never stops listening, even as the words it hears from the mouth of the Lord drive it into action- common, ordinary ways of action in the midst of details of daily life that are the mechanics of God’s created order.

Therefore, our challenges include experimenting with how best to dedicate all the developing forms of communication and the cultural phenomena they foster and by which they are nurtured, so that the Word that kills and makes alive can do its tasks anew. We need to figure out how to speak with those whose sense of personal responsibility and desire to justify themselves on their own terms does not permit them to hear the law as accusing and killing. For them the conversation can still begin, in Luther’s language, in any of its crushing and terrifying forms. Today’s hearers also need what Lutherans have not needed in most of their cultural settings previously: aid within God-forsaking societies to raise up their children in the ways that they are to go, in the footsteps of Christ, when the culture no longer helps point the way but designs detours through life that derail and disorient. For them the gospel of the forgiveness of sins, which they must finally hear, can be prefaced by the good news of God’s justifying those whom the world de-dignifies and renders unworthy for any number of reasons. For Christ died and rose to give life and deliverance also from all that others do to us to make us victims of their sins. In a world in which speech is recognized as performative, the additional insight of how God’s speech re-creates and renews is one of our easier tasks. Luther’s affirmation of the God-pleasing goodness of life in this world, in all its realms and situations, is also tailor- made for adaptation to twenty-first-century hearers. Like Luther, we follow in Christ’s footsteps, pushed along by the Holy Spirit, into the world that belongs to our Father, and we are moving to reclaim it and its inhabitants for the family.

Endnotes [1] See Heinrich Grimm, “Die deutschen ‘Teufelbücher’ des 16. Jahrhunderts. Ihre Rolle im Buchwesen und ihre Bedeutung,” Archiv für die Geschichte des Buchwesens 16 (1959). [2] These works by Musculus and Spangenberg are discussed in Robert Kolb, “The Devil & the Well-Born. Proclamation of the Law to the Privileged in the Late Reformation,” in Let Christ Be Christ, Theology, Ethics & World Religions in the Two Kingdoms, Essays in Honor of . . . Charles L. Manske, ed. Daniel N. Harmelink (Huntington Beach, CA: Tentatio, 1999), 161-171. [3] See Christopher Boyd Brown, “Devotional Life in Hymns, Liturgy, Music, and Prayer,” in Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 205-258; cf. on the use of such literature and other forms of popular piety, see Robert Christman, “The Pulpit and the Pew: Shaping popular Piety in the Late Reformation,” ibid., 259-303. [4] Janis Kresliņš, Dominus narrabit in scriptura populorum. A Study of Early Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Teaching and Preaching in theLettische lang-gewünschte Postill of Georg Mancelius (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992). [5] Johann Heerman (1585-1647): Prediger in Schlesien zur Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003). [6] Valerius Herberger, The Great Works of God. Parts One and Two: The Mysteries of Christ in the Book of Benesis, Cahpter 1-15, trans. Matthew Carner (Saint Louis: Concordia, 2010), 15. [7] Ibid., 58. [8] Ibid., 83. [9] Ibid., 96-101. [10] Ibid., 245-251. [11] The following discussion relies heavily on Theodor Mahlmann: “Die Stellung der unio cum Christo in der lutherischen Theologie des 17. Jahrhunderts, in Unio. Godd und Mensch in der nachreformatorischen Theologie, ed. Matti Repo and Rainer Vinke, Helsinki: Luther-Agricola- Gesellschaft, 1996, 72-199. [12] Lund, “‘modus docendi mysticus’: The Interpretation of the Bible in Johann Arndt’s Postilla,” in: Hermeneutica Sacra. Studien zur Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift im 16.- und 17. Jahrhundert / Studies of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Torbjörn Johansson, Robert Kolb, and Johann Anselm Steiger (eds.) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). [13] Eric Lund, “‘modus docendi mysticus.’ The Interpretation of the Bible in Johann Arndt’s Postilla” in Hermeneutica sacra. Studien zur Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift im 16.- und 17. Jahrhundert / Studies of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Torbjörn Johansson et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). [14] Seventeenth-Centiry Lutheran Meditations and hymns, ed. Eric Lund (New York: Paulist Press, 2011), 43. [15] Ibid., 45. [16] Ibid., 48. [17] Ibid., 71. [18] Ibid., 94-95. [19] Ibid., 112. [20] Jonathan Strom, Orthodoxy and Reform: The Clergy in Seventeenth Century Rostock (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999). [21] Harm Klueting, Reformatio vitae Johann Jakob Fabricius (1618/1620)-1673. Ein Beitrag zu Konfessionalisierung und Sozialdisziplinierung im Luthertum des 17. Jahrhunderts (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2003). [22] Philip Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria, trans. Theodore g. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964), 30-31. The historical introduction to this edition is filled with errors and so must be used with caution. [23] Angelika Dörfler-Dierken, Luthertum und Demokratie. Deutsche und amerikanische Theologen des 19. Jahrhunderts zu Staat, Gesellschaft und Kirche (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).

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Discipleship in the Lutheran Tradition

Colleagues,

If “mission,” our general theme for these past many weeks, is a hot topic in the church at large these days, so is “discipleship.” It stands to reason. The one requires the other. Who can be sent—missioned, if you will—unless they know what the sending is for and are ready to serve the one who sends them? Mission agents need training, in other words, and if the mission they serve is Christ’s they need intense training of a sort that God alone is able to accomplish. St. Mark’s Gospel is especially vivid on that point.

That said, what’s the training about and what does it aim to achieve? The Church’s multitude of traditions continue to answer that in many and often conflicting ways. Today’s offering brings you Luther’s view of it and begins to explore how that view played out among subsequent bearers of the Law/Gospel tradition. What you’re getting is the first half of a paper delivered at January’s Crossings conference, the theme of which was discipleship. The author is Robert Kolb, Missions Professor of Systematic Theology (Emeritus) at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis and, famously, co-editor of the latest and definitive English translation of the . Dr. Kolb’s scholarship is prodigious. We learned in January that he’s been spending six months of every year poring through archives in Germany that bear on the development of the Lutheran tradition over the centuries. You’ll see abundant fruits of that research as you read, not only now but next week too, when we send you the second half of his paper. His assignment at the conference was to tell us what our Lutheran forebears understood discipleship to be, and how they practiced it. You’ll be surprised, we’re guessing, by his opening observation. Then you’ll be enriched by the wealth of what follows. It bears a close and careful reading, especially today when too many Lutherans, intent on “making disciples,” are repeating old mistakes that Luther et al. corrected. More on that two weeks from now.

Peace and Joy, Jerry Burce, for the editors

The History of Discipleship in the Lutheran Tradition

If we wished to be fundamentalistic, we could make this a very short lecture. Even though Luther used the words for “disciple” and “discipleship,” in his translation of Scripture, the word itself did not become a part of Lutheran theological vocabulary until much later, perhaps first in the twentieth century—Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Nachfolge(he did not think it was necessary to mention the cost in the title) being the first, or at least one of the first, major work promoting the vocabulary in our tradition.

On the other hand, trying to survey in forty-five minutes, what Lutherans have emphasized in their teaching of the Christian life is an impossibly large task since different cultural situations and different eras have made a variety of demands on Christian leaders’ thinking about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. So this lecture will only try to use some examples and observations, mostly from the first two centuries of Lutheran history, to provoke our thinking about our own following in the footsteps of the one who has buried our sinful identities and raised us up to walk in his footsteps as trusting children of God.

The lecture will offer some positive examples of faithfulness to Luther’s insights into the nature of the life of faith, fostered in repentance through the proper distinction of law and gospel, but negative examples of straying from Luther’s insights also abound. The lesson to be drawn from this historical picture admonishes us to remember that we stand always in the midst of the eschatological battle between God and Satan, between the truth of Jesus and the devil’s deception, which seeks to weaken and misdirect the faith that creates the believer’s person as a child of God.

The dynamic equivalent of “disciple” in Wittenbergese was simply “believer” [Gläubiger] or “listener” [Zuhörer] or “child in the congregation” [Pfarrkind]. Some in our day may protest that “believer” is something less than a disciple, only the starting point. But Luther, Melanchthon, their students, and their students’ students believed that if you trusted in the Lord above all that he had made, you would do what the logic of faith makes inevitable: those who have been buried with Christ and raised with him walk in his footsteps.

Many Reformation historians today are emphasizing the continuities between late medieval piety and Luther’s thought [1]; the continuities should not surprise us since the most original of human geniuses have been the products of their time and carried much of whatever traditions they inherited with them into their new way of thinking. At the same time, however, Luther remains the most celebrated sixteenth-century denizen of the planet not because of the continuities but because he transformed the basic definition of what it means to be Christian. He abandoned the definition of the Middle Ages—a religion conceived of within the framework of pre-Christian Germanic worship of the gods, in which ritual performance of sacred rites and practices insured the relationship between God and human creatures. If ritual secured the individual Christian’s life, the hierarchy secured the life of church and society in this system.

Luther turned instead to the definition he found to be biblical—a life of trust in the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, who is a God of conversation and community, a life which proceeds from God’s address to his human creatures in his Word, in all its several forms. In that definition the entire life of the Christian is determined by the fundamental relationship of love and trust that stems from listening to God’s Word and turns into a life of praise to God and service to other people. Ritual and liturgy are not absent from the life of the church in his vision of Christian living; they serve as vehicles and setting for the proclamation of God’s Word in all its forms and the response in the believers’ praise and prayer. The daily life of believers is complicated by the presence of sin and evil, which create the situation in which God’s law must crush false faiths and their symptoms, so that his gospel promises can re-create that trust that defines the fullness of our humanity. Medieval ritual performance gave way to faithful hearing of God’s Word as the key to the dynamic equivalent of what we call discipleship.

The Dynamic Equivalent of Discipleship in Luther’s Thought The first element of Luther’s understanding of discipleship focused on the communicating God and the trust that defines human life by defining him as the source of all good and a refuge in every time of need—the ultimate source of our core sense of identity, security, and meaning. On the basis of this redefinition of what a Christian is—a hearer of God’s Word, one who trusts in him through Christ, and who lives a life as a joyful child of God in Christ—Luther also transformed the word “fromm” “upright,” the kind of person you want for a neighbor, into a word which carried the connotation of a faith-based life of new obedience—”pious” in the best sense of the word. Brian Brock notes that “the preoccupation of antique conceptions of ethics with individual flourishing is displaced in Luther by an inquiry into what it means to live with God, in which the dramatics of fellowship are emphasized. … Luther’s emphasis is on transformation into the form of Christ understood in terms of Nachfolge, the following of … a God who is leading in time. … Luther’s is a dialogical ethic of hearing and speaking with God.” [2] The relationship between loving God and trusting child of God and hearer of his Word determined all of life. Luther presumed that God’s newborn, re-created children reflect the fact that they are chips off the old block. That Luther seldom used the word discipleship need not distract us from the fact that he was very much concerned about Nachfolge, as the sense and shape of the life of faith. For instance, his Small Catechism was designed to serve as a handbook for Christian living, on the basis of the personal acquaintanceship which its text, particularly that of the Creed, fosters.

The second element of Luther’s understanding of discipleship stems from his placement of repentance—being turned from false gods to Jesus Christ—at the heart of daily Christian living. Luther’s conception of how human life proceeds within God’s greater history of dealing with his people shaped the reformer’s understanding of daily life. He struggled his entire life with the mystery of the continuation of sin and evil in the lives of the baptized. Emerging from the penitential piety of the monastery, which had burdened him with his guilt over his sins in ways that the ever-easier pastoral discipline of the fifteenth century failed to alleviate, Luther recognized in the pattern of Israel’s apostasies, God’s call to repentance, Israel’s return to faith and faithfulness, and its subsequent falling away a pattern for each individual believer’s own history. He defined true biblical repentance as the heart of the daily Christian life: “the old creature in us with all sins and evil desires is to be drowned and die through daily contrition and repentance … and daily a new person is to come forth and rise up to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.” [3] Indeed, “the whole life of the Christian is a life of repentance,” [4] of daily dying through the surrender of sinfulness to the buried Christ and the daily resurrection to a new life defined at its core by trust in the one in whose footsteps faith dares to follow. Convinced of the devil’s power, Luther viewed everyday life in both the realm of faith and that of life as battlefields on which God’s truth battled Satan’s lie, Christ’s gift of life stood under attack from the legions of the murderer, the great deceiver (John 8:44). The whole life of the Christian is part of the great eschatological conflict between God and Satan. His reordering of the medieval program for instruction, the catechism, in his handbooks for catechism, placing law before gospel and the Christian life thereafter reflects this fundamental conviction about the shape of the believer’s life.

A third element in Luther’s understanding of faithful hearing and following in Christ’s footsteps emerged from his supplanting of the medieval exaltation of “sacred” activities and the entire religious realm over the “profane,” the everyday. He did not ignore those activities that reflected faith in Jesus, such as prayer and praise, but he emphasized that everything done in faith is God-pleasing (Rom. 14:23). Thus, to the instruction he gave in carrying out God’s commands and practicing human virtues, e.g., in the Large Catechism, he added the framework of service in the responsibilities, the callings, of everyday living in home, economic activities, and the wider society, the politia. [5] To provide clues for living out this life Luther concluded his Small Catechism with instructions for daily meditation on God’s Word and prayer and a table of succinct pointers on how to live within the structure of God’s ordained situations according to his callings and commands.

A fourth observation about the shaping of Lutheran piety, from the days in which, according to a recent issue of The Economist, “Luther went viral” [6] until now. James Nestingen has pointed out that Luther’s catechisms provided not only a linguistic but also a cultural translation of Latin models of conveying the faith. [7] Yale missiologist Lamin Sanneh points out that when such cultural translations take place, the culture experiences change from the input of the Christian message, and the message is shaped by the language and perceptions of the culture. [8] Among many very important cultural factors was the use of media, especially in two forms. The Reformation developed the potential and place of the sermon, locally prepared and delivered for the most part, as the most effective way of shaping minds and lives of villagers, townspeople, and courtiers alike. It exploited the half-century-old but not yet fully developed potential of movable type for shaping minds and lives across a wide geographical area. Luther’s catechetical revolution rode on the development of Gutenberg’s way of printing as well as the rhetorical rules for oral delivery of the message which Melanchthon was developing precisely for this purpose, among others. The development of the relationship of love and trust in God, as he has revealed himself as Jesus Christ, the daily dying and rising accomplished in repentance through the use of God’s law and his gospel, the cultivation of new obedience through the motivation of the gospel according to instruction given in the law all took place through the use of God’s Word, in oral, written, and sacramental forms. It is a commonplace that, although the Wittenberg Reformation took place to a large extent as an oral event, it was fueled and driven by effective use of the printing press. [9] We dare not lose sight of both verbal components as integral parts of this Way of the Word: Lutherans have always lived from what was said and what was read. Sermons, absolution, and the mutual conversation and consolation of Christians with one another live from and foster the reading of the Word in Scripture and every other form of Christian literature as the agents by which repentance and faith are created and new obedience finds its forms.

A negative cultural factor in the development of the Lutheran way of ecclesiastical life came with the inevitability of continuing a close association with political power. All cultures need a religious element, but they need it for social and political purposes. Establishment of such an official religion always brings with it social-cultural obligations that always fall in the realm of the law, not necessarily but often to the disadvantage of the gospel. Lutheran churches were not unaffected by such developments.

The Second Generation To a large (though varying) extent, Luther’s students and adherents in the sixteenth century caught these profound changes in the understanding of basic concepts and conceptions of the faith. Throughout the following centuries the most perceptive of those claiming the name “Lutheran” have understood that, as Erik Erikson told us without being Luther’s disciple, trust determines human personhood and personality, and that the object of our ultimate and absolute trust determines much of the way we act, or at least want to act.

Luther’s students and adherents also used many of the same rhetorical tools and other methods which they had learned from him and Melanchthon. Lutherans were initially, for the most part, listeners because many could not read or write. During the last half millennium, they have generally recognized that, as Luther observed, oral forms of communicating the gospel that arise from Scripture, such as the sermon and catechism instruction as well as absolution and the mutual conversation and consolation of Christians with one another, have played an important role in Lutheran cultivation of Christian living in every era. But the printing press did serve Luther and Melanchthon well, and their followers put its technology to use with skill. Devotional literature, catechisms, sermon books, and hymnals have cultivated Lutheran following in Christ’s footsteps in every era.

In the first and second generations after Luther and Melanchthon had launched the profound alteration in the perceived form and shape of Christian faith and life, the emphasis on trust in the suffering and dying Savior, and on his resurrection, remained clearly at the heart of Lutheran preaching. The sermons in the postils and other printed homiletical works, including funeral sermons, focused on what Christ has done for sinners and on their need for the working of both law and gospel in their daily lives. The mortification of the flesh and the call of the Holy Spirit to cling to Christ remained a key to at least the published preacher’s message. But even as Luther had been most concerned about giving his hearers and readers clear, forthright instruction in what to do to live in trust toward God by following his plan for human living—for instance, in his Wartburg Postil of 1521/1522—so his students and followers also focused repeatedly and strongly on helping their congregations understand what God wanted them to do as his trusting children, where many of them were straying from his plan, and how they should carry out their callings by obeying his commands.

Much Lutheran literature aimed at the fostering of trust in the Savior and care for the neighbor by grounding the hearer’s understanding of human existence in the Scriptural address of the sinner/saint and deepening the desire of believers to fear, love, trust God above all else and to love the neighbor as oneself. Luther had designed his Small Catechism for use by parents in cultivating the faith of their children and servants. His ideal of a life guided by meditation on the catechism took concrete form in the second section of the Small Catechism, in which children were to learn the discipline of consideration of the content of Scripture in the form of the commandments, creed, and Lord’s Prayer and response in prayer.

His colleagues and students were convinced of the importance of home devotions for the nurture of faith and new obedience: Some sixteen years after Luther’s death his friend Nikolaus von Amsdorf penned a critique of parental irresponsibility in neglecting the regular preparation of children and servants for Sunday morning services, and the review of the sermon, particularly its admonitions and its comfort, afterwards. [10] This devotional discipline did take place in the home of the Saxon court physician and municipal physician, Matthaeus Ratzeburger, whose personal practice of the devotional life is chronicled in the account of the doctor’s dying days by his pastor Andreas Poach. Before he turned to Hippocrates and Galen, the physician began the day by reading a half or whole chapter of the Bible, along with Luther’s interpretation of the passage. Early mornings he read Luther’s commentaries on Genesis, Joel and other prophets, and his Galatians commentary (which he had read several times), as well as the volumes of Luther’s Works as they came from the presses, first the Wittenberg edition and then the Jena. His volumes contained underlining, little crosses in the margin, and other notations. Afternoons and evenings at table he read the German Bible or the appropriate sermons from Luther’s Hauspostille or Kirchenpostille or some other German work of Luther for his wife and children. On Saturday evenings he read to his children and servants from Luther’s Large Catechism and heard their recitation of the Small Catechism. Sunday mornings he read his older sons passages from the Latin Bible or Luther’s commentary on Genesis. Ratzeburger read the Bible and Luther’s works not only for his own benefit. He also applied their message to others. When visitors stopped by, the physician often told them what he had been reading and “applied it to our own times and activities, for our instruction, comfort, and warning.” [11]

In fact, most families seem not to have been capable of meeting Luther’s expectations and Ratzeburger’s example, but the tradition of catechization remained strong in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheran churches. Preaching the catechism, continuing the chief medieval mode of offering instruction, was mandated in most church orders, but increasingly pastors or schoolteachers also used Luther’s catechisms and the flood of expansions of them that appeared throughout the period to train up children in the way that they were to go. At every level of learning, from primary school to university catechetics, throughout the period, from Johann Spangenberg’s early supplements to Luther from 1541 and 1542 to Conrad Dietrich’s range of catechisms and university textbooks, pastors and professors contributed to the burgeoning body of manuals of the faith, which sometimes justified the judgment of Hans-Jürgen Fraas, who saw an “Akademisierung des Katechismus”—a trend toward theoretical language and detailed information. [12] This judgment compares apples and oranges, to a large extent, for the expansions of the catechism were aimed at upper level students in many cases. Nonetheless, most perpetuated Luther’s understanding of the catechism as instruction not only for the head, but for heart and hand as well. The way of life that this instruction molded found its grounding in faith in Christ even when the balance of emphasis shifted to the law, as it inevitably does in instructing children, also through the Lutheran catechisms, which strove to serve as handbooks for Christian living. [13]

The catechisms taught people who also absorbed the faith from a variety of other forms of literature. In sermons and devotional literature the successors of the Wittenberg reformers continued to present God’s structure for daily life in terms of his calling his people into specific vocations in home, economic life, society, and congregation. There they were to live the life of new obedience to God’s commands, living out the virtues that God had designed for good human living, avoiding the vices that Satan was trying to seduce them to practice. The charge of some social historians that Lutheran pastors functioned merely as agents of socialization in slavish service of their rulers is false; it ignores not only Luther’s call that preachers serve as critics and consciences for their princes but also the bare facts of continuing, often sharp, criticism and calls for repentance for abusing powers that came from Lutheran pulpits throughout the early modern period.

But a kernel of truth lies behind the charge, too. For good Christians make good citizens and subjects, these preachers were convinced. They rebuked and condemned the practice of vice as well as the failure to trust in God, and they, like Luther, offered many positive suggestions for the practice of new obedience, in the realms of family life and economic activity especially. Yet many were anything but the legendary toadies of princes they are often reputed to be. Repeatedly in their postils they admonished princes and municipal counselors to behave according to God’s law and to practice justice. Repeated stories of the exiles of Lutheran pastors throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—most prominently, the hymnist —confirm that they followed Luther’s admonition to preserve the peace by calling rulers to repentance so that their subjects would have no cause for discontent and their God would not send his wrath upon their unjust practices.

Endnotes [1] Prominent among them has been Bernd Hamm; see the collection of his essays, Religiosität im späten Mittelalter. Spannungspole, Neuaufbrüche, Normierungen, ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). [2] Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God. On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 165-166. [3] SC Baptism 4, BC 360. [4] SC, Table of Christian Callings, BC365-367. [5] SC Confession and Absolution, 20, BC 360. [6] “How Luther went viral,” The Economist, December 17th, 2011: 93-96. [7] James A. Nestingen, “Luther’s Cultural Translation of the Catechism,” Lutheran Quarterly 15 (2001), 440-452. [8] Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message. The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1989). [9] Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Printing, Propaganda, and (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), e.g., 1-2, 11, 37, 172. [10] Robert Kolb, “Parents Should Explain the Sermon, Nikolaus von Amsdorf on the Role of the Christian Parent,” The Lutheran Quarterly 25 (1973): 231-240. [11] Vom Christlichen Abschied aus diesem sterblichen Lebgen des lieben thewren Mannes Matthei Ratzenbergers der Artzney Doctors Bericht durch Andream Poach Pfarherrn zun Augustinern in Erffurdt/ vnd andere/ So dabey gewesen/ kurtz zusamen gezogen. Anno Domini M. D. LIX. Mense Ianuario (Jena 1559), A2b-A3b. See Robert Kolb, “Ars moriendi lutherana, Andreas Poachs Schrift ‘Vom Christlichen Abschied aus diesem sterblichen Leben . . . Matthei Ratzenbergers’ (1559),” in Vestigia pietatis. Studien zur Geschichte der Frömmigkeit in Thüringen und Sachsen. Ernst Koch gewidmet, ed. Gerhard Graf, Hans-Peter Hasse et al. (Herbergen der Christenheit: Sonderband 5; Leipzig, 2000), 95-112. [12] See Hans-Jürgen Fraas, Katechismustradition. Luthers kleiner Katechismus in Kirche und Schule (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971) 72. Fraas suggests that Melanchthon’s Catechesis puerilis (1540) is an early example of an academic catechism. [13] See Gerhardt Bode, “Instruction of the Christian Faith by Lutherans after Luther,” in Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550-1675, Robert Kolb, ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2008)159-204.

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Colleagues,

Last week we heard a pastor, Mark Greenthaner, reflect on his work in Australian Lutheran schools that embrace the mission of Christ as a defining characteristic of their identity. This week’s offering is a counterpoint of sorts to Mark’s observations. The author, our own Carol Braun, is a lay polymath whose vocation as teacher unfolds in a secular academy in New York City. You’ll get the details directly from her. More to the point, you’ll hear her thinking out loud about her calling as a double-agent missionary (my term, not hers) who serves two distinct missions, one secular, the other anchored in Christ. I, for one, am especially struck by her description of the values that shape and drive her students. Give some thought as you read to how these values manifest the law of God in its operative and ultimately deadly glory and, in doing that, necessitate the breathtaking gift and promise of Christ. This being noted, thanks be to God for Carol and every other Christ-truster—our churches are filled with them—who salt the earth day after day with their love for the driven children of God that Jesus died for.

Peace and Joy, Jerry Burce, for the editorial team

I teach physics, math, and English at a private high school with no religious affiliation. I therefore spend more time every day talking with teenagers than with anyone else. Many of them are the children of immigrants, and their cultural backgrounds are diverse. They come from a variety of faith traditions, and many of them have no religion at all. The fact is, I don’t know what percentage of them are religious, because we rarely talk about our own religious beliefs. In part, that’s because we’re busy discussing other things—how to find the range of a projectile, or solve a quadratic equation, or make sense of Shakespeare. But of course there’s more to it than that. Even in our downtime, during free periods or after school, I hesitate to bring up my own religious beliefs and practices, or to ask my students about their spiritual lives. Having taught here for four years, I can count on one hand—practically on one finger—the number times I’ve had a frank discussion with my students or even my colleagues about the non-secular aspects of my life.

So, do I consider myself to be a missionary to the secular American academy? Not really. Certainly not in any kind of overt or straightforward way. In short, that’s not my job. The academy has its own mission of pursuing secular truth through the teaching and learning of the arts, sciences, and humanities. My job here is to support that secular mission. In a sense, though, I suppose that anyone who spends Sunday morning in a pew, and who spends private moments in prayer, and who reads the Bible at home, is a kind of missionary—or emissary, or person who’s sent—into the secular weekday world. As I interact with my students, I sometimes find myself wondering how they might respond to the Gospel if they heard it. How would it sound to them, if they haven’t heard it already? Is it something they’re yearning to hear, even if they don’t realize it? Or would it strike them as superfluous, irrelevant, absurd?

To put the question another way: Who are the young people who are being formed today by the multicultural, secular academic institutions like the one I now call home? What motivates them? What’s important to them? What do they want? And how do those motives and values, needs and desires, intersect with the things God wants for them? Even if no one is confessing the Gospel of Christ within the walls of the academy, it’s still likely that, where confession does happen, it sometimes falls on ears that have been shaped by this kind of secular institution. How might the Church’s message sound to those ears?

I often have rather explicit discussions with students about what they want—if not out of life, then at least out of the next few steps in their education. One recent conversation comes to mind: A ninth-grader was working on his application to a rigorous extracurricular science program at a prestigious New York university. He asked for my feedback on his application essay, in which he sought to explain why he was interested in the program. In the essay he listed his many accomplishments and awards in math and science, and his longtime dream of becoming a doctor. He gave explicit credit to his parents for supporting him in his career goal, explaining how they provided him with books and supplies to advance his scientific interests. Finally, at the end of the essay, he said that he hoped the challenges of the university’s program would add to his record of outstanding academic achievements. As we reached the end of the essay, I asked him to dig deeper: “Why do you want to add to your list of academic achievements?” He answered quickly and candidly: he sought further achievements because they gave him a sense of accomplishment, and because (in his words) they brought honor to his family. He added, rather urgently, “I need to get in.”

This drive toward success, tied closely to a sense of responsibility to one’s parents, is very common among the students I teach. In most cases, I get the impression that the students come from homes that are loving rather than draconian, and that with their parents’ high expectations comes an equal measure of caring support. The students themselves are driven both by their parents’ expectations and, even at a young age, by their own conviction that they need to work hard to reach or surpass their parents’ own levels of achievement. College (especially getting into a “good college”) is a major stepping stone toward that goal. In my first year of teaching, when I asked my class why they’d decided to take physics, over half of them said “Because it looks good on a college application.” The next year I decided not to ask.

Of course, in the process of striving for achievement and honor, most of my students discover that they have a genuine passion for some of the things they’re asked to do. They develop a taste not just for the general glow of success but also for the pure joy of doing something that they love and excel at—be it in the classroom or art studio, on stage or on the basketball court. In the context of the secular academy, this kind of natural passion is cherished as a precious resource: it drives young people to pour their efforts into the pursuit of truth and excellence—not for the building up for their own glory but, it seems, from some kind of higher motive. Such a person, within the academy, can be trusted as the truest and best member of the community: someone who is unlikely to commit academic sins like plagiarism or cheating or poor sportsmanship, and who serves as a natural role model to others. Confidence has its place in academic circles, but among university professors and high school teachers alike I have often observed an institutional reverence for humility, especially when coupled with outstanding achievement.

In this context, I often think about the Christian notion of devoting one’s life work to the greater glory of God—the idea of putting your life in God’s hands and asking him to make you an instrument for the accomplishment of his will on earth. In response to the question “why do you want to do what you’re doing,” the Christian has answers quite different from those given by her secular counterparts. A closely related question that’s also on the minds of thoughtful high school students is, “What responsibility do I have to others?” The secular American academy generally honors those who serve the poor and unfortunate. This is reflected, for example, in my school’s policies of rewarding and requiring community service. I’ve heard students complain about peers who (rumor has it) use community service as yet another way to pad their college resumes. I’ve also heard a surprising number of them say that, while they initially balked at being “forced” to serve others, they came to derive a real sense of fulfillment and purpose from the experience. This leaves open the question, however, of why they do what they do. I’ve gotten into some rather heady discussions with eleventh- and twelfth-graders about altruism and whether they can be truly altruistic if they’re motivated by their own desire to give their lives purpose and meaning. In general, those discussions end with the conclusion that yes, altruism is possible. But at such moments, especially, I’ve found myself strongly tempted to reveal how my understanding of service is colored by my Christian worldview, which casts all humans as beloved children of God, and which casts charitable love for others as a fitting and God-willed response to the love he gives to us. Again, on this point, I sense that the Christian has answers which the secular seeker might find intriguingly different.

This brings me to the question of what it is that God wills for these young people shaped by the secular academy, regardless of whether or not they think they have any use for him. I don’t know how to answer the question of how the Church might frame its confession of the Gospel so as to ring true in the ears of these young people. I don’t even know if that’s a useful question to be asking. But I do know, from the Gospel itself, what it is that God wants for them: simply put, he wants them for himself. He loves them and yearns (1 Timothy 2:3-4) for all of them to be saved and come into knowledge of the truth personified in his son Jesus. And in this sense at least, I do see myself as a missionary to the secular American academy, because I believe that God has sent me here to see all his children as he himself sees them-as his beloved sons and daughters, each one precious to him. The thought that some of God’s love for them can be channeled through my own love for them is the best motivation I have for doing the job that I do.